Claws
by Inkfire
Summary: They're haunting each other with passionate ferocity, dancing on the edge between hatred and obsession. A BellatrixHarry, for Mist, who ASKED.


**All right, who wants some brain bleach? **

**Dedicated to the one and only Mist with his wonderful jokes, for giving me the damn -BEEPBEEPBEEP- pairing. You'll remember in the future that I have no sense of humour when it comes to writing :P **

**This is not actually HarryBellatrix because I'm mad, but not that mad. It's a completely messed up torture fantasy with a faint sensual edge to it. If you're really looking hard. Which I don't advise, tbh. **

**Shutting up. Enjoy, if you can.**

Ever since she _heard_ his sorry little name, she wanted to break him like a rag doll under her hands.

Harry Potter, the _Boy Who Lived_. The legend – the flash of smug hope in the scum's eyes.

(_she wants to crush that hope. To extinguish it_.)

She would have loved to stand and watch him tied up to a grave, bloody and terrified, or running around to escape the Dark Lord like the little boy he is. Oh, she would have loved that – but by now, she's not sure it'd be quite _enough_. She's met his oh-so-famous green eye, glinting with righteous hatred, disgust and a laughable, steady flame of hope – determined to fight back, and convinced to survive. So, so _convinced_ – and she's known, with that one look, that Harry Potter, acquainted as he is with death, has never really looked it in the eye.

And _of course_ it made her want to treat him to that very special knowledge, gracious being that she is.

She can't kill him (_His word is law._) but she can break, and she can taint. She can slaughter his friends, ravage his world. She knows they will, but she _yearns_ to be the one – to deliver the blows.

It's a physical thing, hunter and prey, a craving of possession and destruction – instinct speaking. She _wants _Harry James Potter screaming under her wand, weeping and begging and broken, poor little hero that he is. She _wants_ to grip him by the hair and force his neck back – dangerously, deliciously close to the breaking point – she _WANTS_ to stare into his watering green eyes, to hear him babble for mercy and sob, all mighty-Chosen-One pretences _evaporated_. She wants him to beg _her_. _Hers_, his pale skin – a child's – bare under her claws, his dilated pupils haunted with the reflection of her own, his mind twisted and warped by fear out of recognition, his mouth contorting, convulsing – tracing her name with a hopeless plea. She wants the voice that spoke _His name_ broken and hoarse with screams, heavy with strangled sobs – begging her. He is in dire need of a few more scars to teach him the lesson he's refused to get for so long: _life isn't pretty. Life is fucked up and then you die. You are the prey, you'll die quicker. Take it and be grateful_.

(_sometimes she thinks it's a favour she's doing them, and then she remembers it's a knowledge that _burns_. She doesn't mind – she's never been one for lies._)

There are times when she almost considers letting him go, when he's all good and scarred, shattered inside and out. She would know she'd stolen his peace forever, know that he'd wake up at night, screaming, shrieking, shaking, clawing, begging to die. And no one would be there to oblige. What a pretty picture to imagine, leaving him branded with that madness of hers, her toy forever and ever and a bit longer than that. _Until death do them part_ – and beyond – but it is _selfish_, stealing away his martyr's fate for her own pleasure – and her Lord would make her scream for this errant thought, he knows how to as well as she does. The Boy-Who-Lived _will_ come to die.

(_she's only hoping to get her go at him, first_.)

* * *

Whenever he thinks of her, he finds his teeth gritting, his blood boiling.

He hates an awful lot of people, all things considered – the whole lot of the Death Eaters, and, obviously, Voldemort. _She_ is different. If he were a hundred per cent honest with himself he would realize that she fits the "obsession" category. But he _cannot_ be obsessed with Bellatrix Lestrange, he has better things to be thinking about – that's a Chosen One's lucidity for you. So he just hates her, loathes her, abhorrs her – and that's it.

(_isn't it?_)

He's quite used to nightmares, fuelled by everything he's seen – and God, has he seen quite a lot by now – but all the same he is unsettled when she appears in them. It is different – he isn't helpless in those dreams. He wakes up panting and drenched in sweat, heart hammering, hands clutching and twisting the sheets wildly, his whole body hard as iron, every muscle clenched... an irate voice roaring vicious things in his head.

He can't go back to sleep after that.

He sees her pretty often, on Wanted posters smirking down at him – and as a shadow everytime he closes his eyelids. It's not like the dreams though because she's not tangible enough. She taunts him, cackling and whispering, breathing his name – and Sirius'. They drop like poison from her lips, blade-sharp with cruel echoes under a veil of mockery... and when he jumps, mentally lunging to catch her, she fades away.

At first he thinks those images were sent by Voldemort to drive him mad. Shortly he knows better.

The dreams aren't like that, though.

(_the dreams aren't really nightmares, and that's all because he's caught her_)

He dreams of grabbing her and holding her down. (_He's got to mean it_) but honestly he doesn't mean anything, it's just a dream, he's not responsible for his dreams. Really. He dreams of her struggling and kicking and scratching, wandless, helpless – just a gaunt skeleton of a woman, her arms thin and easily twisted, her pulse racing wild in her throat. And he's aching to destroy, to tear with his bare hands, to strangle and to break. Her pulse beats feverishly as her lips contort into a snarl, and he wants to bite, to feel her prized pure blood upon his soiled tongue...

...and he jolts awake, maddened, his stomach lurching.

He tells himself that they're just dreams, it's only because he feels so_ helpless._ He's not violent, he's not like her, he's better than that. She deserves the Dementors, he thinks fiercely, the _Dementors_.

But the Dementors are on the loose.

(_and he's not thirteen anymore_)

He wants her back in Azkaban, he wants her broken on the floor... but he can't quite look at Neville anymore. Nor at Draco Malfoy, after he's met his mother... nor at Sirius on his parents' wedding picture.

(_once she was beautiful, just like him – no. She's a monster, just a monster_)

He thinks of her as evil embodied. _That's_ why he wants to break and maul her.

(_and bite the too-high laughter from her thin lips._)


End file.
